"Not many had any adequate conception of the vastness of the cattle interest in the great pasture region lying on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains during the seventies and eighties. It was worth quite a journey to see a single thousand head of these cattle engaged in feeding together. To witness a drove of 4000 moving leisurely along at a convenient distance from each other, to allow the animals to graze as they traveled a mile or so an hour, would seem to an unaccustomed eye as if the herd must consist of tens of thousands. The appearance of such a drove as this might be recalled by a single transaction made by Dennis Sheedy of Colorado, who sold 27000 head of cattle to the Ogalla Cattle Company. This company was composed of A. H. Swan, of Cheyenne, Wyoming, William Paxton, of Omaha, Nebraska, and J. H. Bosler of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The cattle were put on a range on the north side of the north Platte Run in Nebraska and Wyoming. The lumping price was $30 per head, amounting to $810,000 for the entire lot."[23] _Texas Cattle_ "It will be no departure from the strictest truth to say that the oldest known race of cattle on this continent is the Texas or Spanish cattle. They have been very generally popular with the stockmen of the plains, because they turned the free grass of the plains into available cash for their owners. "The Texas cattle are truly the only animals except the bison that deserve the name of "Native" American cattle. All the other scrubs in the country are foreigners by blood, or are descendants of intruders from other lands. These long legged, big headed, thin fleshed brutes were in this country centuries ago. It is by no means certain that their ancestors did not roam the plains of the Brazos and the Rio Grande a thousand years or more before America was visited by the Spaniards. There is evidence that the real ancestors of the cattle of Texas were seen in Old Mexico and described about five hundred years after the Christian era, but this evidence has been considered unworthy of full confidence, because to admit its truth would be to confess that the honor of first discovering America belongs to the barbarians from the Orient.